Educators as “digital immigrants”

One of our goals is to help students become iKids and truly global citizens. 

In many countries today’s students are referred to as “digital natives”, and today’s educators as “digital immigrants”.  Teachers are working with students whose entire lives have been immersed in the 21^st century media culture.  Today’s students are digital learners – they literally take in the world via the filter of computing devices:  the cellular phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs, and laptops they take everywhere, plus the computers, TVs, and game consoles at home.  A survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people (ages 8-18) mainline electronic media for more than six hours a day, on average.  Many are multitasking – listening to music while surfing the Web or instant-messaging friends while playing a video game. 

Even toddlers utilize multimedia devices and the Internet with tools such as handheld video games like Leapster and web sites such as www.PBSkids.org and www.Nick.com. Preschoolers (including my 2-year-old grandson) easily navigate these electronic, multimedia resources on games in which they learn colors, numbers, letters, spelling, and more complex tasks such as mixing basic colors to create new colors, problem-solving activities, and reading.

However, as Dr. Michael Wesch points out, although today’s students understand how to access and utilize these tools, many of them are used for entertainment purposes only, and the students are not truly media literate (such as, how to use the tools to enable our students our students to become truly media literate as they function in an online collaborative, research-based environment – researching, analyzing, synthesizing, critiquing, evaluating and creating new knowledge)